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U.S.-Pakistan: From alliance to active dislike

Events like this month's attacks on Christian homes are commonplace. | AP Photo

By JOEL BRINKLEY | 3/26/13 11:01 PM EDT

In Pakistan on Tuesday, Islamic militants killed a girls’ schoolteacher in a drive-by shooting. Earlier this month, an Islamic-militant suicide bomber blew himself up in a federal court complex, killing four people and wounding at least 33 more, including a judge.

An angry Muslim mob attacked a Christian neighborhood of Lahore. They set fire to 150 of the neighborhood’s 200 homes as well as two churches. That same day, a bomb exploded in a mosque, killing at least five people and wounding 28 others.

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Lethal violence of this sort is a commonplace, almost daily event, as militants and jihadists are allowed to roam freely through the state. And Husain Haqqani, former Pakistani ambassador to Washington, blames the United States — indirectly.

Given that Washington has provided $23 billion in aid since 2002, “In Pakistan, there is always the assumption that the United States is not going to restrict us too much,” Haqqani said. “There should be a price to pay for having jihadists in the country.” But “the U.S. is reinforcing the presumption that they can do whatever they want — they can have their cake and eat it, too.”

In other words, Haqqani says, the United States is subsidizing his country’s “bad behavior.”

Not everyone agrees, though among experts interviewed, there is universal agreement that relations between Islamabad and Washington have never been worse. Put simply, neither nation holds much if any respect for the other, and the people of both countries dislike, if not despise, each other, numerous surveys show.

“The U.S.-Pakistani relationship is toxic,” said Daniel Markey, a former senior State Department official focusing on South Asia, now with The Brookings Institution. “And my sense is that it’s unlikely to change.”

“Each country considers the other to be a terrible ally,” Haqqani asserted.

At the center of this totally dysfunctional relationship lies that copious U.S. aid, including $7.5 billion approved in 2009, to be disbursed over the following five years. And when the Pakistani government fell into a major fiscal crisis late last year, it seemed to demand a request for help from the International Monetary Fund. But the government didn’t want to approach the IMF because of the stringent economic conditions the fund attaches to its loans.

Well, almost out of the blue, $688 million in U.S. military aid suddenly landed in the government’s coffers — “coalition support funds, reimbursement for military action on the Afghan border,” Markey said.